I am a MA/MBA candidate at the Lauder Institute and the Wharton School of Business. I focus on Russian politics, economics, and demography but also write more generally about Eastern Europe. Please note that all opinions expressed here are mine and mine alone and that I do not speak in an official capacity for Lauder, Wharton, Forbes or any other organization.
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Russian Opposition Leader Alexey Navalny is Not Terribly Popular

Contained in an absolutely outstanding report from the Pew Research Center “Russians Back Protests, Political Freedoms, and Putin, Too,” a report I would strongly encourage everyone to read in full, was some fascinating information about popular attitudes towards protest leader and increasingly prominent anti-Kremlin activist Alexey Navalny.

While I knew that Navalny’s internet celebrity hadn’t spread to all Russians (even though internet penetration is growing rapidly in Russia, it’s still barely past 50%), I figured that those people who had heard of him would tend view him very positively. This is because you would reasonably expect that people knowledgeable about Navalny would younger, more liberal, more opposed to Putin, and more attuned to social media and the internet than the average Russian. In short, I expected that popular attitudes towards Navalny would match the Western media narrative about him: a budding political celebrity who, while not quite ready for primetime, was successfully building substantial grassroots support (see here or here for standard Western media accounts of Navalny).

Well it turns out that’s not at all true. Not even a little bit. Among Russians who have actually heard of him (about 47% of the population) Navalny is viewed negatively by almost twice as many people (31%) as view him positively (16%). Think about that for a second. The hero of the opposition, the man who is supposedly going to displace Putin in the very near future, can, right now, count on the support of something like 20% of the population. Meanwhile Vladimir Putin, supposedly a political has-been, is viewed positively by more than 70% of Russians.

Now Russia is a country of roughly 143 million people. 20% of a number that large is a lot of people, more than enough to get a very substantial turnout at protest marches. Navalny supporters are every bit as “Russian” as people who support Putin, and I am in no way arguing that the oppositionists are somehow inauthentic or any less “real:” they ought to have every opportunity to express their views and make their voices heard, and the police treatment of them has been nothing less than horrific. The fact that Putin is popular, of course, doesn’t in any way justify the authorities’ brutal conduct or the general sense of corruption and decay that surrounds the Russian government.

However, the Pew poll results pretty conclusively demonstrate three facts about Russia in mid 2012 that conflict with the emerging narrative:

1) Putin has a very strong level of public support

2) Navalny, the highest profile opposition leader, has a very limited level of public support

3) a movement for Putin’s immediate resignation (one of the opposition’s main demands) would be anti-democratic

That last one might sound a bit provocative, but how else could one characterize the departure of a political figure with 70% approval?

You could, perhaps, argue that people were intimidated and scared into saying they support Putin. But if Russians were totally unwilling to say what they “really” think about Putin why would they be so open with their frustrations with the judiciary, the police, the military, and a wide variety of political and economic institutions? Why would they voice support for the protests which Putin has so explicitly and colorfully condemned? Moreover, if public opinion polling in Russia is inherently impossible, if the country’s repressive political institutions means that people simply will not speak their minds, why did Russians’ “confidence” in Putin slip from 84% in 2007 to 69% in 2012? I would say that difference between Putin’s 2007 and 2012 figures in the Pew polls is pretty easily explainable by the observable weakening of his political position, the 2008-09 recession, and the growth in the opposition movement. The alternate explanation is…well what, exactly, that this is an accident or a random bit of statistical noise?

One could argue (and I would agree!) that the long-term trends favor Navalny, or a Navalny-like figure, at the expense of Putin: structural changes in the economy, in education, and in urbanization all suggest that Russia will, in the long-term, become much more liberal than it is today. The Pew results show that Putin’s support is disproportionally drawn from women, people without college education, and people from rural areas. None of these groups are growing, and in the years to come all of these groups can be expected to make up a reduced share of the population.*Russians are going to college more frequently, continuing to move to cities, and working age males are drinking themselves to death far less frequently.

Pew’s results strongly suggest that support for Putin will continue to slowly wither in the months and years to come, but what they do not suggest is that the Kremlin is on the precipice of collapse and that US support for the opposition will result in the swift empowerment of a liberal opposition figure. Putin is going to be around for years to come: you can think this is good, bad, or anything in between, but we may as well get used to it and plan accordingly.

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You really are trying to have it both ways here arguing he has very limited public support but that the long term trends favor him. Too much equivocating. I see no evidence in the social science tea leaves that a Navalny like figure is where the opposition will turn. Its much more likely to turn hard left than it is center right and towards a Navalny (and I’m well aware of how little the left and right dynamic mean in Russia). Navalny can’t be an up an comer and at the same time have negatives twice as large as his positives among the half of the population that knows who he is. The half who don’t are in a cohort even less likely to demonstrate positive attitudes towards the man even were they to know who he is. I fully agree that opposition to Putin will grow as the country and civil society develop, but I don’t see this opposition turning towards anyone like a Navalny who demonstrates pro-Western views and certainly not towards a center right pro-market figure like a Navalny. The bulk of the opposition is socialist in flavor. They want a real liberal democratic figure — a Mironov who isn’t a puppet of the Kremlin. A Navalny will appeal to the nationalist bent, but without a more populist message his audience will stay nice and narrow.

Mark, a slight miscalculation in your post. You write that Navalny is supported by 16% OUT OF 49% of total population, who heard about him. Than you write that Navalny is supportyed by (roughing it up, I guess) 20% of the population of 143 mil. That’d be 143/100*20=28,6 mil. (or 22,8 mil if you use exact 16%) Now. 143 mil. is TOTAL population of Russia. Only 49% (70,07 mil.) of them HEARD of Navalny and out of these only 16% support him) The final number of people would be 70.03/100*16=11.21 mil, roughly a population of Moscow by 2010 estimates and accrues to 7.8% support out of total population of Russia. Quite a difference.

“Navalny is Not Terribly Popular” Thank God, he realized at last!))) The author has written numerous articles absurd, and now wonders what Navalny not popular. The U.S. government should provide the remaining 50% of the population of Russia the Internet who not all know Navalny))). In addition, there are news on TV and radio and newspapers. About Navalny know things are not very good opinion, a bad lawyer, revolutionary, bad and corrupt citizen. Who decided that he should replace Putin? The logic of the article is absent as in the previous

Oh come on! Were you there? Did you witness first hand this “nothing less than horrific” brutality meeted out by the Moscow cops?

I do agree that some of the officers may have quite understandably lost control with some of the “oppositionist” supporters whom they had seized after having had assorted missiles, including a petrol bomb, thrown at them from one section of the “millions” that marched on that day in Moscow.

Have you ever seen the French Guarde Republicaine in action? Or the German or Italian or Spanish riot police in full swing? High pressure water cannon are often used in many European states to disperse crowds of protesters (the water is often dyed so as to identify protesters later), and the London Metroploitan Police are not noted for their gentle nature when dealing with protestors. In fact, one London riot cop is now undergoing trial for murder after his having attacked with his baton an elderly man who didn’t “move along” quickly enough at the accused cop’s order to do so.

Compared with the crowd control activities of many other police forces, the Moscow police and OMON have been almost unprecedented examples of sweetness and light in situations which certainly would not have been tolerated in many other European states.

And those that are detained often claim in English that they are “beaten to a pulp” by the cops in the holding centres. This is a phrase of theirs that they must have picked up at school, for they clearly do not understand the meaning of the expression: a person who has been “beaten to a pulp” usually wakes up, if he indeed wakes up at all, in hospital with various tubes stuck up his body orifices.

Furthermore, those that are arrested these demonstrations – and the vast majority are not arrested: in fact, there have been several marches of late where there have been no arrests whatsoever – are usually held by the police for little longer than two hours. And some of them, it seems, then they rush off to foreign journalists to tell of the horrors that they have endured.

Kasparov was fond of doing this. He once complained that whilst incarcerated in a cramped police cell, he had to relieve himself in – horror of horrors – a bucket! And the food was so bad, claimed Kasparov, that he had to have food brought to him by friends. The poor mite!

I was there. And there was no petrol bombs at all. Few provocateurs threw rocks but they weren’t captured for some reason. And they still free even though they were identified after little investigation (made by activists not police of course). Instead of that police kicked lying people and punched people in a face who even didn’t resist. Don’t tell me about horrible european cops. In most of the video’s I watched from Italy, France and Germany where police did hard there was crowd destroying storefronts and parked cars and throwing molotov coctails which has nothing in common with moscow’s protests. We are 100% peaceful.

Author should separate these too different kinds of support. Those who support Navalny clearly know what’s happening in Russia. And I’m sure there are dramatically less of us even than Pew discovered in their survey. On the other hand 70% who ‘support’ Putin are passive and uninformed. They just have no idea how beautiful our country would be without Putin and his thieves. We see that many attempts to find dirt on Navalny was unsuccesful and it matters. And it’s just question of time for people to see where good and evil is.

PS: And where did they get that 70%? If it’s official elections results, note that only ~50% of population have voted. And also there are opinions that at least ~10-15% of Putin’s votes was falsified. So real results could be like 0.5*(0.55~0.6) = 27.5 – 30%